My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  “Of course you had to be more than strong to row a fully-loaded canoe over thousands of miles of rivers and lakes and live to tell about it. And to toss around packs that weighed in at ninety pounds each like they were so many pillows. But portaging? That’s where your muscles really kicked in. Who here knows what it means to portage a canoe?” A sea of hands shot up. These fur trade groupies knew the score. I called on the dwarf missionary who was practically jumping out of his cowl to supply the answer.

  “It’s when you have to take the canoe out of the water and carry it till you get past the rapids.”

  “Exactly, mon père. Portaging, ah, what a business that was. We dreaded it like nothing else. Whenever we spotted foam churning up on the surface of the water up ahead, our stomachs sank, because that lather meant rapids, no two ways about it. And rapids and canoes don’t mix. So what we’d do, we’d have to hustle up on shore and empty the canoe right down to the bottom. Remove every single solitary thing. And a canoe like ours could carry four tons of cargo, easy. You heard me right. That’s eight thousand pounds we’re talking. So what did we do with it all? Well, we had to load it on our backs. What other choice was there? Most of us, we carried two or three packs at a time, way more than our own weight. And don’t forget, on top of that, some of us had to carry the canoe itself. Water soaked, it weighed a good seven hundred pounds or more. Now there was a job. We carried it turned upside down on our shoulders, four of us usually for a canoe this size. Take it from me, portaging was pure torture. Overland, burdened down, for miles and miles and miles, however long it took till the river calmed down and we could relaunch, reload and paddle on.”

  I moved over closer to the canoe. It dwarfed our poky makeshift stage as if it were a felled redwood. The kids could see the boat was the real deal, weighty, not a dinky prop. It radiated heft, as if it had a personal magnetic field that was bear-hugging it to the floor. Renaud, Sam, Nick, and I took our pre-arranged places on either side. We shook out our arms to loosen them up, did a few neck rolls right and left, and performed some bravura knuckle-cracking. Then, at my signal, we grabbed hold of the canoe and hoisted it up over our heads into portaging position. Even the parents gasped. It was as if we’d clean-and-jerked a grand piano. We marched in place with it over our heads to give them the general idea. As a party piece it was damned impressive if I say so myself. That canoe was one heavy sonofabitch but we’d practiced for hours to get the lift just right. The experience taught me why the voyageurs had pushed to have their health plan cover hernias. The guys and me, we expected a certain amount of clapping after we set that sucker back down, but the waves of applause practically blew us off the stage, followed by a standing ovation no less.

  We flew through the rest of the script surfing on a high that Olympians must feel when they’ve turned in a performance that’ll snag them a gold. And before we even registered that the time had gone by, bang, it was over. One of the kids asked me to autograph her arm on her way out of the museum. I’m telling you I felt like a rock star.

  We did a threepeat of the production, but for the midnight show we were planning to shake things up. The crowd massing outside the museum entrance was even bigger than for the earlier shows. Whoever it was who’d told me that the kidlets stop coming as the night wears on had it all wrong. No way we’d be able to cram them all in. The overflow would just have to hang around till one a.m. if they were determined to see us in action. Considering how late it was, past their bedtime and then some, I figured this batch of kids would be dozy, but I was dead wrong. They were hyper awake, fuelled on all the sugary bouffe their parents had been stuffing them with all night long from the food trucks along Ste. Catherine Street. Well, they were in for a special treat.

  The four of us kept on script till I got to my mini Q&A with the audience. “Does anyone here know what it means to portage a canoe?” I asked for the fourth time that night. I pointed at a kid who reminded me of Serge’s daughter Élodie. Could even have been her, with those liquid eyes so like papa’s. This little girl had screwed up costume-wise, she was wearing a coonskin cap à la Davy Crockett, but her heart was in the right place. “It means to carry the canoe on land to get around something dangerous in the water, like rapids or rocks. You put it up in the air like this,” she said. And she lifted her stick arms to demonstrate.

  “Right you are,” I said. She beamed as if I’d given her a gift. I went on to deliver my same little lecture, portaging-is-torture blah blah blah, and then moved over to the canoe for the guys and me to do a rerun our feat of strength. On three we heaved the canoe up over our heads to the gasps that were old hat to us now, but this time around, instead of marching in place, we slalomed our way through the kids and portaged the canoe right out of the museum and into the store. It was a tight squeeze, but with both of the double doors open, we just made it through without even scraping the finish.

  I could sense a bit of a commotion behind me in the museum as we made our exit. The parents were thrown. Was this the end of the performance? Should they take off for the next event on their Nuit Blanche schedule? I couldn’t blame them their confusion. Ambiguous endings always burned me too. But in the midst of the parental dithering one pipsqueak with ADD jumped up to follow us, and that’s all it took to convince the rest of the pack to join in our slipstream. That settled that. The parents couldn’t just let their precious bambinos hotfoot it off unsupervised so they tacked themselves onto the end of our conga line and off we went.

  Even for a night when it was in to be out, we made one helluva spectacle. The Nuit Blanche crowds in the store clapped us on as we trotted through the aisles at a rickshaw clip. We could hear them all hooting and whoo-whooing as we passed like they were cheering us on at a marathon. Who knows, maybe after this indoor portaging would catch on. There were more demented sports out there for sure. We circled through all the departments on the museum floor, even Fine China and Stemware. Me and my compadres, we were staking out new territory. Voyageurs weren’t trained to manoeuvre through breakables, but we managed it without a single wine glass crashing to the floor. Our cornering was impeccable. Neat, tight turns. And our footwork was Bolshoi nimble.

  Once we’d hit all the departments on five, we pointed our canoe towards the down escalator. Our cockiness knew no bounds. Navigating on terra firma was one thing, but with the earth shifting under our feet? We had no choice the way I saw it. We owed it to Nuit Blanche, to the museum, and to all the voyageurs who art in heaven to give it our best shot. Getting on the escalator went okay. Just. I gauged the speed of the top-most sliding step perfectly and got my foot planted on it solid. But then the combination of the movement, the angle, and the pressure from the canoe overhead made me feel like I was in a 747 coming in for an emergency landing. I got all light-headed and wondered when the little yellow oxygen masks were going to pop out. Good thing the descent only took a few seconds. For that long I could suck it up. Our dismount? Steady if not elegant. Small victories.

  The voyageur roadshow hit all the departments on every floor. We portaged ourselves through Intimates and Sleepwear, Plus Sizes and Petites, and Boxers and Briefs. You’d think we’d slow down as we went on, toting a dead weight like we were, but instead we whizzed along faster and faster, in full show-off mode. The kiddies who were playing tail to our comet could hardly keep up with us with the result that after a while they started to crash and burn; a tantrum here, some puking there. Their parents had to pluck the casualties out of the line as they dropped. By the time we got down to one to do a flypast of Mum’s counter for her to see what her son had come to, there were just a few diehard imps still trailing us, and once we finished our rounds of the first floor at the door marked Personnel Only, we didn’t have a single tailgater left. Not a one.

  I flashed my employee ID at the card reader and the door popped open all hospitable to welcome me and my guys in. The staff locker room just inside was deserted for once. Made sense. Who’d want to be hanging out back there BS-ing when all the excite
ment was out in the store? Same deal just beyond at the cleaners’ assigned space. The equipment was all there, yeah, but no sign of life. The carts with their buckets and mops and swiffers were backed in for a change so they’d be ready to shoot right out in the morning to deal with the strata of schmutz the Nuit Blanche revellers had dumped in their wake. We breezed right on through unseen. From there we sprinted past the ghost town of the heating plant, and then skirted building maintenance where the absent operators had bedded down their forklifts and skyjacks for the night. At the recycling hub we hooked a sharp left and that’s where we picked up the corridor that led to the loading dock. Rossi was there to meet us, perched on the edge of a plasti-wrapped sofa that was waiting to be shipped out, its toe tag marked Dorval.

  He jumped up when we got there.

  “You ready?” he asked me.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Ya sure?”

  “Now you’re asking me? Yeah I’m sure. C’mon. Let’s get on with it. We don’t have all night.”

  “Because you can still change your mind, you know.” Rossi, my backup conscience, wasn’t making any headway in rescuing me from myself. He had a nerve even trying. He knew the rules. Hell, he’d taught them to me. Once you shake on it, there’s no dismantling a deal. If he was suffering from accomplice’s remorse, tough shit.

  “Okay,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re the boss.”

  Rossi stepped over to the control panel next to the loading dock door and punched in the code on the key pad. We all looked up so we could catch the great door rumbling to life, lifting overhead on its runners. Not an easy thing to do with the canoe constricting our sightlines. But it didn’t matter in the end. There was nothing to see. The thing didn’t budge. Not so much as a jiggle. And the light on the panel never switched off of no-go red.

  “Try it again,” I said. “You must have punched it in wrong.”

  So he did. Same result. Meaning no result. The door hugged the ground so tight you couldn’t have slid a dime under it. The Bay must have paid out plenty to get the top-of-the-line weather stripping.

  “Quit doing it from memory,” I told him. “You probably reversed a couple of the numbers or something.” At least I hoped he had, though as far as I knew Rossi wasn’t one to dyslexify. He hesitated at my suggestion. Which worried me. “You do have it written down somewhere, don’t you?” I asked him. But no sooner had I said it than a vision came to me of no-loose-ends Rossi in the fifth floor can, flushing the scrap of paper so it wouldn’t be around to incriminate us.

  Rossi stood stock still in front of the keypad, like it had put a hex on him. “I memorized it right,” he insisted. “I punched in the right sequence.” Was he scamming me? Had he mixed up the numbers on purpose to kneecap my scheme? My poker face clearly needed work. It was letting some signals leach out. Rossi picked right up on my suspicions as if Siri had whispered them into his ear. He reached into his jeans’ pocket and pulled out a crumply piece of the Bay’s official letterhead to show me. “Here,” he said, smoothing it out against his leg. “This is the code I lifted from head office when we lost power during the flood. Put your glasses back on and read it out to me. Or better still, punch it in yourself.”

  “No need,” I said. “You do it. Go ahead.” Jesus, as a friend I could be a real shmuck, but there you go. For the third time in as many minutes he punched in the numbers, slow and steady, taking the time to check each one against the paper. Same story. The garage door didn’t know from those numbers. It continued its snooze while the rest of us ratcheted up into panic mode. Or I should say I ratcheted up. My kayak guys were just along for the ride. They sympathized, sure, but the panicking privileges were mine and mine alone. Okay, mine and Rossi’s.

  Instead of keeping a cool head like I should have, I jumped down his throat. “You didn’t know enough to test it out?”

  “I did test it,” Rossi said. “I know my business.”

  “My ass. If you knew your business the door would be open.”

  “I tested it over and over since you put me on it. Three days ago it went right up.”

  “Three days ago? That’s the last time you tried it? That was what? Wednesday? And now we’re Saturday?”

  “Yeah, Wednesday. And it worked like a dream, I’m telling you. Up, up and away.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to test it any more recently? Like today maybe? The crucial day. The day we actually needed it to go up? The day that mattered more than any stupid Wednesday? Would that have been too much to ask?”

  “You don’t get how it is,” he said. “I couldn’t just come in and test it every day. It would attract too much attention, me being down here where I have no business to be. I had to stay under the store’s radar.”

  “Well let me be the first to congratulate you, O master of your craft. You stayed so far under the radar that you fucked up everything. What was I thinking? I never should have trusted you with anything higher level than slicing a tomato. Of that, you’re capable. Two jobs I gave you to do. Two stinkin’ jobs to be responsible for. The code and the security cameras. We already know that you bombed out on the code. You’re not going to turn around and tell me that they’re filming us right now, are you, in all our glory?”

  “The cameras are dead. Trust me.”

  “Trust me, he says. A real comedian. Well what do you suggest we do now, pardner? Try to wedge this damned canoe out through the revolving doors maybe?” The canoe was gouging permanent coolie divots into my shoulder, and my knees were torquing in such a way that prophesied a lifetime of appointments at Concordia Physio Sport. We didn’t dare put the boat down. We had no juice left. If we set it on the floor now, we’d need a derrick to lift it back up again. The sweat was streaming off me. It was probably the first time in my career as a voyageur that I genuinely smelled like one. My body was in no mood to treat Rossi with kid gloves. Besides, I wasn’t one of those magnanimous-type bosses who’s prepared to absorb all the blame himself because he stinks at delegating. I needed a scapegoat. I couldn’t bear the weight of so much failure on my own head. I had to delegate it too.

  “All that time, all that work, all that planning, shot to hell. Thanks to you and your dollar store criminal instincts we’re screwed with a capital S. That’s it. Game over.”

  Rossi never wanted this assignment. He’d hung up his criminal spurs for good by the time I met him. To my eternal shame I convinced him to dust them off for this one final job. I painted it as a humanitarian act. A righting of historical wrongs. Knowing him, he probably only agreed to come on board so he could keep an eye on me and here I was using him as a punching bag. Need a three letter word for turd? It’s B-E-N.

  But that didn’t stop me from laying into him. My rant was running on a loop and I made no effort to pull the plug. Hysteria does weird things to a guy. I was back to chewing Rossi out about the code when we heard a rustling right behind us. What with all the flap over the stuck door nobody’d remembered to play lookout. As gangstas we were shleppers, pure and simple.

  “Allow me,” Serge said, coming out of the woodwork. He circled wide around us portagers. The canoe’s hind end was fishtailing on Nick and Sam’s depleted shoulders and he didn’t want it to conk him one on his way to the control panel, for that’s where he was headed. Serge, turns out, was a man of parts. Who’d have thunk he was the Elton John of the keypad? His magic fingers tripped lightly over its numbers and the door responded presto by rolling upwards in a graceful arc as it was meant to do. The puff of fresh air it let in from the outside revived me, but not half as much as the sight of the U-Haul truck idling on the ramp with Morrie tapping his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel.

  Me and the guys jumped back into action, our case of the wobbles miraculously cured. We eased the canoe down into the truck onto the nest of straw Morrie had prepared for it. Not for him the bubble wrap or packing peanuts most DIY movers swear by when they need shock absorbers. Morrie didn’t want the canoe to suffer any
more culture shock than absolutely necessary he’d explained to me earlier. So straw. Once we had our birchbark baby snuggled in all cozy and safe, we lifted out the kit canoe to ferry back upstairs to the museum. The whole swap only took a couple of minutes and when it was done I gave Morrie two take-off thumps on the roof and he was out of there. I poked the close button on the control panel and now that the door had been newspaper-trained by Serge, it rumbled obediently down at my command to settle at my feet. By the time we had the ersatz canoe firmly settled on our shoulders Serge had taken off so I couldn’t thank him, but I’m guessing my benefactor knew how I felt about his drive-by act of kindness.

  19

  Permit me to introduce Morrie 2.0. Or maybe it would be minus 2.0, considering.

  The Morrie I reconnoitred with early the next morning at our favourite secluded cove wasn’t my Morrie. This Morrie, the one standing in the glare of my headlights when I drove up, was resplendent in the full voyageur. A major shock to my system. In all our endless envisioning of this day, he’d never once let on that he was planning to go native. Not that he owed it to me to tell me what he’d be wearing. What was I, his mother?

  Ooh, he was one dapper sun-of-a-gun I had to admit, decked out in a primo outfit like he was heading off to some fur trader cocktail party. He had on an eye-popping pair of mukluks, not lowly moccasins like mine which are the voyageur equivalent of Keds. His boots went all the way up to his knees. They were tied around traditional style by criss-cross thongs, and lined in some rich, dense fur that tufted out at the top. Beaver? Lynx? I’d drooled over mukluks like those on the web. The cheapo ones, relatively I mean, were lined in serviceable, everyday rabbit, but the high flyer versions had inners of coyote, or silver fox even. A pair of those babies could set you back all right, a college education would run you less, but they’d keep your toes warm and dry on a long voyage, that’s for sure. No point asking Morrie how he came to be in possession of such extravagant footwear. That was usually an unprofitable line of inquiry to pursue with him.